Much interest has met the launch of Google Wave, from both consumers and businesses. Having just received an invitation to try the service, I can confirm it’s currently rather clunky and lacking many of the features needed if it’s to be taken seriously by business. But that’s only to be expected from an alpha version [...]

I’ve spent much of the past two weeks explaining to non-techie friends and associates why Twitter is not just another Facebook or the latest Web 2.0 cross-over craze, but a landmark in the history of the Internet (and consequently business) as significant as the arrival of email, the web, Google search or peer-to-peer file sharing. [...]

Surviving and thriving through a downturn is as much about capturing a bigger slice of a shrinking market as it is about cutting costs, so focusing on customer service is key. But you won’t know what customers really want from you unless you listen and engage openly.
Traditionally, you might use market research to do this, [...]

The growing importance of new social network tools in improving the relationship between customers and service providers was brought home to me in a rather vivid fashion last week, although not necessarily in a way that will prove useful to many others.
It started mid-way through an important meeting at a newspaper office in London when [...]

The recent row over Facebook’s proposed new terms of service illustrates why catch-all ‘rights grab’-style terms are wholly inappropriate for the era of open collaboration and portable data. A huge, rapidly-co-ordinated backlash by users and privacy campaigners forced Facebook to throw out plans to make its (already unpopular) terms apply in perpetuity, even if users [...]

Like many others I use Google’s online services for a variety of tasks, relying on Gmail to keep a backup of my emails, sharing occasional files on Google Docs and even playing with Latitude, their new geolocation service, to see if it is more effective than Brightkite or FireEagle.
The various Google offerings have done a [...]

In my last blog, I raised questions about the potential or otherwise of managing crowdsourcing activities in Web 2.0 internal and external organisational environments. Last year a Demos study suggested that companies should not assume that networking on Facebook, Bebo, and Myspace was a waste of employees time. Demos noted that firms are increasingly using [...]

There’s a lot of debate at the moment about the challenge of managing ‘Millennials’ or ‘Generation Y’. Does the arrival of the first true digital natives in the workforce really represent a defining moment in the history of management? Or is our anxiety over these demanding youngsters just another chapter in the record of inter-generational [...]

Tim Weber is business editor of the BBC News Online site, possibly the most popular news source on the Internet. He has been blogging recently from the World Economic Forum in Davos, and I thought the Exchange audience might be interested in an article he just posted on Friday.
Tim’s article is a great overview of [...]

It’s snowing in Britain today.  This may not seem to be particularly interesting or indeed significant, but a few centimetres of snow has brought much of the southern part of the country to its knees by closing airports and shutting down London’s transport system.
Many may consider this a pathetic response to weather conditions that are [...]